Could the bomb have been meant for him? Frank was unable to discount the idea. If his enemies realized their previous attempt to blow him to kingdom come had failed, they might find a certain pleasing symmetry in another bomb attack. But it didn’t strike him as likely. As far as anybody knew, Frank Segreti was long dead-and anyway, an attack like this was awfully imprecise. No, he thought, if they’d found him, they woulda probably popped him from afar with a high-powered rifle or grabbed him off the street and tossed him into a panel van to drive him someplace remote so they could work on him awhile in peace.
If the attack had nothing to do with him, that meant he had a chance-albeit slim-of getting out of this alive.
“Sir! Sir!”
The voice came from somewhere behind him. Male, tinny, distant. It took a moment for Frank to realize it was aimed at him.
Frank spun, head swimming as he did. A man in a U.S. Park Police uniform was standing a few feet behind him. How he’d escaped Frank’s notice before, Frank had no idea. He didn’t realize until this moment how profoundly the blast had affected him. His ears rang. His equilibrium was shot. His head was cloudy and slow to process information. Concussion, probably. Not Frank’s first.
The officer placed a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked. It sounded as if he were shouting from the end of a railroad tunnel. Consonants were lost. Meaning dulled. Frank mostly discerned his words based on the movement of his lips.
“I’m fine.” His own words also sounded muffled to his ears, but the cop recoiled as if he’d shouted. The effort it took to speak set him coughing, a hoarse jag that ended with him spitting a wad of phlegm onto the path. “I’m fine,” he repeated, quieter, once his coughing subsided.
“We need to get you checked out. First responders are setting up a triage area in Crissy Field. Come with me-I’ll take you.”
“No!” Frank said, alarmed. If he were held, counted, and cataloged, he was as good as dead. He eyed the man’s sidearm. Handicapped the odds of wresting it free of its holster in his addled state. Decided they weren’t in his favor. “I mean-you can’t. There’s a family down the path from here,” he said. “Two parents and three kids. They were closer to the blast than I was. I think they’re hurt.”
The cop looked torn. It was clear to Frank he’d been instructed to bring anybody he encountered back for processing. But then he nodded. “Okay. I’ll go check on them. See if they’re all right. But you stay put until I get back.”
“Sure thing, Officer,” Frank said. “I ain’t going anywhere.”
The cop took off down the path. As soon as he disappeared from sight, Frank fled.
Eager to avoid other first responders lest he be forced to do something he’d regret, he ignored the footpath, instead ducking into the scraggly underbrush and pushing upslope through the branches.
Small fires licked at trees where embers had caught. Debris littered the ground: Chunks of asphalt the size of Frank’s fist. Twisted bits of metal in glossy automotive finishes. A single tasseled loafer. As soon as Frank identified the last, he looked away; he didn’t want to know if anything was still inside.
Once he could no longer see the footpath, he felt as though he were in a forest that could easily stretch miles rather than in a narrow swath of trees boxed in by roads. But sirens wailed all around, competing with the ringing in his ears and belying his apparent isolation.
His aging muscles protested. His bum knee ached. His lungs burned. Now and then, he was racked with coughing fits, which forced him to stop until they subsided. Frank was only sixty-three-a decade younger than anyone who met him might’ve guessed-but they’d been sixty-three hard years. He’d spent a good forty of them drinking, smoking, and whoring around like he was still that young punk from Hoboken with something to prove to the big dogs across the Hudson in New York. Now he was paying the price for those transgressions-and it turned out the interest was steep.
Frank had been coming to the Presidio ever since he’d settled in San Francisco six years ago. A former U.S. Army base now designated as a national park-albeit an unusual one, given its location within an urban center and the fact that people lived and worked within its boundaries-the Presidio, with its rolling hills and half-wild campus, provided a welcome respite from the densely populated city that surrounded it. He liked to walk the footpaths through the forest groves or the dunes along the water’s edge. He’d sit for hours on his favorite bench and watch the sailboats tack across the glimmering bay. It beat staring at the walls of his overpriced efficiency apartment on Nob Hill and made the life he’d left behind seem as distant and ephemeral as the hazy outline of Alcatraz in the distance.
Today, though, the Presidio might prove just as inescapable as that legendary prison-and as Frank’s own past.
Frank was well versed in law enforcement procedures. He’d spent his life studying them so that he could exploit their weaknesses. No doubt the authorities were in the process of setting up a perimeter around the park; limiting access to and from the site so they could assist the wounded, process evidence, and sift for suspects among the witnesses made sense. But the place was huge-a little over 2.3 square miles-so there was no way they could have fully locked it down yet. If he could escape before they did that, there was a chance that he might live.
Frank came to a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. On the other side, a narrow roadway was cut into the overgrown slope. He heard a crunch of tires. A siren growing louder. He cursed and hit the ground. A white Dodge Charger with a blue stripe raced by, its light bar splashing red and blue across him. More Park Police, he thought, though the Feds were no doubt close behind.
Once the Charger passed, he rose clumsily, bracing himself on the chain link for support. Then he stripped off his argyle sweater and threw it over the barbed wire to protect him. His button-down snagged as he struggled over the sweater-draped fence. As he attempted to unhook it, a barb sank into the palm of his right hand. He gritted his teeth and fought the urge to howl in pain. A groan escaped him as he yanked his hand free and climbed back down. Blood pooled in the hollow of his palm. He wiped it on his shirt and made a fist to stanch the bleeding. Red seeped between his fingers and dripped onto the roadway.
Another car approached, its engine roaring. Frank crossed the road as quickly as his bum knee would allow, ducking out of sight a fraction of a second before the car sped by. Then he scurried once more upslope through the underbrush.
Not bad, old man, he told himself. Not bad. Just keep it up, and no one will ever know you were here.
8.
IN A DUSTY corner of a sprawling English Tudor home in Clinton, New York-a quiet college town not far from the decaying industrial city of Utica-a phone began to ring.
Sal Lombino frowned. His daughter, Isabella, stopped plunking at the piano and looked at him. “Can I get it, Daddy?”
“Not this time, honey. What’d Ms. Malpica tell you?”
She rolled her eyes and said, “That I had to practice at least half an hour every day.”
“And how long’s it been?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Twenty minutes?” The sheepish smile on her face made it clear she knew damn well it hadn’t been but was hoping her old man was too big a softie to call her on it.
“Try again,” he said, smiling himself. Sal hoped that Izzie never got any better at lying than she was today, midway through her seventh year. But he knew better. Lying was in her DNA. Her hateful bitch of a mother did it for sport. Sal did it for a living.